In a new report released on October 27 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), more than 42% of all technology areas in 2018 incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their new inventions. The majority of these improvements come in knowledge processing and planning/control, which involve analyzing information to gain new insights and using those insights to manage a business process. CIOs continue to talk about how vital AI technologies are, but this new report confirms that if companies aren't already putting that talk into action, they are behind the curve. The danger of falling behind is even greater for companies that haven't started adoption since the statistics only cover till the end of 2018. In the last 18 months, the percentage of technologies that include AI has undoubtedly continued to increase. The report also confirms an increased interest by the office in this technology and a higher willingness to consider new applications that include them.

Technology keeps creating challenges for intellectual property law. The infamous case of the "monkey selfie" challenged the notion of not just who owns a piece of intellectual property, but what constitutes a "who" in the first place. Last decade's semi-sentient monkey is giving way to a new "who": artificial intelligence. The rapid rise of AI has forced the legal field to ask difficult questions about whether an AI can hold a patent at all, how existing IP and patent laws can address the unique challenges that AI presents, and what challenges remain. The answers to these questions are not trivial; stakeholders have poured billions upon billions of dollars into researching and developing AI technologies and AI-powered products and services across academia, government, and industry.

In an earlier post today, we distilled half a dozen DARPA-dense docs into an easy-to-follow overview of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT), a new competition that will task teams of humans and robots to explore complex underground environments. In this post, we have an interview with SubT program manager Timothy Chung, whom we met late last year at DARPA's D60 Conference. "I think for many of the technologies we're seeking to advance--it's one of those, aim for the moon, even if you miss you hit the stars type of an approach," he told us about the new challenge. "So we envision some component technologies being immediately operationally of value, but we've set the bar ambitiously high enough for it to be DARPA-worthy and also provide a vision for how that kind of impact could be magnified if and when we're successful." IEEE Spectrum: What are the SubT courses going to be like?